I promised two things during today's webcast The build system of Visual Studio Team System: links to get started with MSBuild as well as the samples I presented. Let's get started with the easy part, the samples:

From the summary of this security practice: This module presents a set of consolidated practices designed to address ASP.NET version 2.0 security issues. The answers and recommendations presented in this module are tight distillations designed to supplement the companion modules and additional guidance. The practices are organized by various categories that represent those areas where mistakes are most often made.

This was a longer-planned upgrade to our Subversion server that happened today: moving from the 1.1 series to 1.2.1. It went smoothly, especially because I played it safe by doing a dump / load cycle (more details to be found in Migrating a Repository) with all repositories. Safety wasn't the only concern: as detailed in the release notes, I also wanted to move the repositories to a FSFS back end, and take advantage of xdelta compression. I was mostly after server-side features, I don't see many of our devs use the optional locking...

Sometimes, it might be handy to not have VS.NET pick a dynamic port each and every time it starts Visual Web Developer Web Server (aka ASP.NET Development Server or, as it was called back in the old days, Cassini). There is an easy way to get a fixed port when you press Ctrl+F5. First step is to select the Web project in Solution Explorer:

Next, go to the Properties window (DO NOT right-click and choose Property Pages - you will end up somewhere entirely different):

As you can see, I already switched "Use dynamic ports" to False, and in this case, I chose to stick with the default provided port number. When is this port-setting useful? When you automate tests, for example.

I finally got around to make a new version of SvnPostCommitHook. For one, it was about time to include Ben's changes, and secondly I wanted to roll a new version onto our Subversion box - it was still running on v1.3. So much for dogfooding...

With that, here is the change log. Note that the last public version was 1.5:

With the weather being abysmally bad this weekend (snow on 1700m in early August is quite a nasty surprise), I at least got around to complete the book The Best Software Writing I, which consists of essays collected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. I have to admit that I would have never read most of those had I simply stumbled upon them on the Web. But the preselection with a focus on good writing made it appealing to me.